Ukraine was once seen as a child of Russia, inheriting the same dysfunctional political system which represses civil liberties, and prizes strongman autocratic rule. This stereotype has been systematically dismantled for several decades as Ukraine has emerged as the antithesis of Russia. Its vibrant civil society prizes democracy and accountability, and the pace of its innovation – as illustrated by its remarkable development of battlefield drones – is showing up Russia’s centrally planned military logistics, which are mired in corruption.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the recent protests in Kyiv’s Ivan Franko Square against the removal of Mykhailo Fedorov as Defence Minister. Protesters waved placards with handwritten slogans such as “Hands off Fedorov”; “Zelenskyy, wrong dashboard”, in reference to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy; “Don't touch what works”; “Reforms Must Continue”, and in reference to the president, “Vova, what are you doing?”

Not by any stretch of the imagination would public protests of this sort be allowed in Moscow. And absolutely no chance of President Vladimir Putin backtracking on his decision, as Zelenskyy did in acknowledgingt, “I understand, I hear, and I respond to what society is saying.”

Zelenskyy then moved to replace Army Chief General Oleksandr Syrskyi with Mykhailo Drapatyi after days of demonstrations, shifting to a generation of army leaders schooled in the democratic Ukraine, and not the Soviet Union, in the process.

This reflects very different histories and cultures, despite their constant (and usually tragic) intersection over time. Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, these differences have widened with the catalytic 2003-4 Orange Revolution and 2014 Maidan Square protests. The Russian response to the latter, the invasion of Crimea, and the seizure of parts of the eastern Donbas,were nails in the coffin, not of Kyiv, as it turned out, but of the bilateral relationship.

Clear differences

The differences can be seen in the way in which Ukraine has prosecuted the war. Activists became soldiers; bright twenty-somethings set up high-tech start-ups with astounding speed, cycling innovation in a manner that beggars belief, and kept ahead of Russian responses; and the government tirelessly gathered international support, working assiduously to change the narrative from aid to agency.

During the week following the protests, Ukraine continued its long-range strategic strikes using home-built drones, targeting the Wildberries logistical distribution centre, bringing the war home to Russian shoppers. At the same time, the Central Research Institute of the Armed Forces of Ukraine presented Marichka, an AI-powered decision support system designed to expedite planning, centrally collecting and analysing information, assessing the balance of combat probabilities, and generating possible courses of action for the commander’s decision, knitting the battlefield together, making all the high-tech weaponry greater than the sum of its parts.

And, next week, there will be something different, and new, and the next, and so on. The liberating power of the market is clear, whether in terms of technology development or the systems that accompany this - the use of e-tokens, for instance, in the selection of weapons systems by the soldiers.

Ukraine is now one of the most networked countries worldwide; previously it was networked as an internal community to withstand Soviet and, earlier, Russian imperial deprivations.

Resisting Putin

Ask Russian activists about their chances of resisting Putin’s decisions, or going against his rule. Ask the relatives of Boris Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister and opposition leader shot dead in 2015 on a bridge near the Kremlin; the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya shot and killed in her Moscow apartment in 2006; or mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was killed in a private plane crash two months after leading an armed mutiny against Moscow’s military leadership.

And then there is Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption campaigner and opposition leader, who died in a remote Arctic penal colony in February 2024 after surviving earlier poisonings; the human rights campaigner Natalya Estemirova, abducted and found shot dead in July 2009; and Sergei Magnitsky, the whistleblower who died in a Moscow prison in November 2009 after being denied medical care following a corruption exposure and after whom the US named its law targeting human rights abusers and corrupt officials with visa bans and asset freezes.

Countless others have died in mysterious (or not so mysterious) circumstances, including former Federal Security Service (the Russian state security agency, known as the FSB, the successor to the KGB) officer Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko, poisoned with polonium in London in 2006, and Boris Berezovsky, a Russian mathematician and oligarch who was found dead in the bathroom of his London apartment in 2013.

The pattern is clear. Fall out with Putin, and fall out of the window – or worse.

Confusing and conflating Russia with Ukraine is like comparing the Congo with Zambia.

A big country with an authoritarian past, with more than 240 languages and ethnic identities, beset with governance challenges, brimful of resources, on the one hand; on the other, a smaller, but better governed country, with an enduring, if imperfect, democratic history since, ironically, 1991. One has exported instability, the other has attempted to export liberation, not forgetting the disproportionately active role that Kyiv played in supporting Africa’s liberation movements while under the Soviet mantle, a gratitude erroneously inherited in its virtual totality by Moscow. Africa is not the Congo; Ukraine is not Russia.

Democracies seldom wither and die because of spectacular military coups, even those have been on the increase in Africa in the 2020s, especially in the Sahel. They more frequently die because the winner of a legitimate election takes over the state, creating what Institute of Race Relations researcher Terence Corrigan has referred to as a “constitutional coup”, and then changes the rules so that he or she never risks losing. This usually occurs insidiously and subtly and then, like the frog in the pot, it’s too late. And as authoritarians they take their lead from places like Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Autocracies are kleptocracies

There is little not to like about Putin’s Russia for leaders who want to hang onto power at any cost and make lots of money in the process. Modern autocracies are usually kleptocracies, where the rules are broken, the rule of law is captured, journalism is suppressed, and accountability undermined, ensuring impunity and immunity.

For those in Africa who think of Ukraine in terms of, “What’s in it for me?”, the answer is: a great deal. Individual rights and choices are the defining elements, and the ones that are bitterly contested as elites fight to hang onto their privilege and impress others with their view of the world.

As Kemi Badenoch put it in a rare moment of British political unity and bipartisanship, “Ukraine is on the frontline in the battle for freedom.” Freedom has a value, and a power that Ukrainians covet. For those interested in systems that protect the weak against the powerful, and business against predators, as Bill Withers might have put it, there “ain’t no sunshine if Ukraine falls, you know, you know, you know, you know …”

Ukraine’s survival and prosperity is all about local agency. They own this struggle. And therein lies the biggest lesson for outsiders, including Africa’s leadership, and African people.

Dr Mills, who is visiting Ukraine, and Hartley, are with the Platform for African Democrats.